The Surprising Response When I Asked Conservatives to Talk About Climate Change

My mother was a Democrat, my father was Republican, and I am an independent. I can deeply relate to some conservative issues. I can deeply relate to some liberal issues. I tend to not relate to the all or nothing beliefs. I tend to believe that most questions have an “it depends” answer, instead of always being clear cut yes or no.

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I wanted to find out what people honestly think about climate change. So I wasn’t looking to “catch” conservatives saying false or illogical things. I wasn’t looking for pointed questions, gotcha moments, or a debate. I just wanted to listen to thinking, opinions, and anecdotes. So I went out looking for “conservatives” who would talk to me about global warming. Boy was I in for a surprise.

I used several avenues to search for conservative-leaning people. I appealed to my Facebook friends since a handful of them post conservative news and opinions frequently. I posted that I was interested in hearing conservative views on global warming and to please message me if they wanted to chat for a few minutes. The response? Crickets…. Nada. Nothing.

I messaged a cabinet-level official in my state’s Department of Agriculture (a farmer himself) and asked if he knew any conservative farmers who wanted to chat about global warming. He replied that he couldn’t help me, but he referred me to a person who worked in the state farm bureau. After initially welcoming my query, she vanished and didn’t reply or respond to my follow-up emails. I felt like the most unpopular guy at the party.

I messaged, then emailed a police chief who had worked in large and small police forces for 20 years. No reply. I called a guy who flies a Trump flag over his house and asked to buy him a cup of coffee. He only would talk with me under the condition that his wife would be there. As we prepared to set up a time and place he decided he wanted to additionally bring a friend. Then he had to work that day. Then he decided he would never have time to meet me.

Finally, I posted an appeal on craigslist and received three responses. The first response turned out to be a liberal. The second guy didn’t really want to talk. The third guy had grown up on a farm near Long Island and their cropland had been flooded out by rising seas during the past 30 years. Turned out he was a liberal too.

No one would talk about climate change. If climate change was a cartoon character, he would be the least popular guy in the comics.

Then one day I was sitting in my local bagel shop doing some writing. A couple of our local city council reps were there to meet and greet. I was polite and said hello and made small talk. Afterward, the scruffy 70-something guy in a baseball cap at the next table commented to me that he didn’t trust any of them. “Or, for that matter, the liberal Mayor either!”

I smiled as he told me that he should run for Mayor. He proceeded to tell me that he had lived in his neighborhood for 50 years and now it is being taken over by immigrants. I listened and bit my tongue as he told me that the city has white vans that pull up to a low-income apartment complex and new Americans unload on a weekly basis. I asked him what he thought about climate change.

Bingo! I finally snagged one. He unleashed a slew of private theories about the sun making it warmer, the earth getting closer to the sun, and so on. All of the usual myths that we hear over and over that take on a life of their own and every one of them soundly debunked by SkepticalScience.com.

He asserted that he knew the science and the climate science was wrong. He confided that his kids were both educated since they both went to college. I politely poked and prodded that that wasn’t what I was hearing from NASA and NOAA and the people who were measuring the data and running the models. He summarily dismissed it all as a way to spend money and support their jobs.

Once he had vented for a while he rose and said he was headed back home. I held out my hand and we both acknowledged it was nice to meet and exchange views.

After he left a woman sitting at the next table with her mate interrupted my dumbfounded processing and said, “I can’t believe there are still people in the world like that.” I said, “Apparently there are quite a few of them.”

The next week I had a final reply to my original Craigslist post. Bob was a Trump-loving conservative, 40-something single man with no kids who worked in the nearby prison. After exchanging a few Q & A emails we agreed to meet for a coffee before his shift.

Bob told me that he had been a skeptic but he was warming up to the belief that climate change was real. Fundamentally, he said, the difference between the left and right is, “liberals want to spend money and conservatives want to save money”. Second, Bob was really confused about where to find good, reliable information about climate change. And he was aware that some or all of it was biased. So he had lost faith in what was real and what was not real.

Third, Bob believed that the Green movement was self-serving and that their main goal was to make money. His belief was that climate change probably wasn’t as bad as “the liberals” make it out to be, and he didn’t believe it would affect his life in any way.

As I have interacted with others on this topic my nuggets of wisdom are this.

• Stereotypical political labels are not very useful. There are conservatives who range widely on the climate activism spectrum. And liberals too. How many liberals have contacted their senators about climate change? (Not very many.) And some liberals share Bob’s belief that the corporate green movement is driving misinformation and hurting the credibility of climate change activism.
• Furthermore, conservatives have strong beliefs that tend to be guided by people they trust. Those people tend to be friends and family — not distant scientists.
• As a result of my research, I have come to understand “conservatives” better now that I see patterns of principles that guide their thinking. I hope that conservatives are interested in understanding liberal principles and finding ways to work together.

Now, if I could only understand why they would vote for Trump!